Transport Insights

There are definitely questions to be asked about how well the government has run various rail routes – and particularly South Western Railway (SWR) – since they were nationalised, but the Daily Mail is not the outlet to do it – and here’s the proof.

Marking a random period since SWR was nationalised in May 2025, ROSS CLARK says:

If Burnham thinks bringing back the clanking, wheezing ghost of British Rail will make the trains run on time, here’s the proof he’s DELUDED

Describing Labour’s plans (which pre-date Burnham) as “bringing back the clanking, wheezing ghost of British Rail” is hardly a set-up that inspires confidence in objective analysis. I don’t remember seeing the party, or the government setting out the policy in those terms.

The analysis of how has it all worked out includes:

the luckless passengers trying to travel on South Western from Surbiton to Waterloo in recent days might not have felt Labour’s doctrinaire experiment was ‘really positive’ after all.

In the space of just one hour, no fewer than four services were delayed or cancelled – for different reasons.

I sense a little bit of cherry picking here. From “recent days” we focus on “just one hour”.

There are about 10-12 trains running from Surbiton to Waterloo in the morning peak, and two were cancelled and two delayed. Is that all that bad, as the worst you can find?

I agree that

cancelled because of more trains than usual needing repairs at the same time

is an embarrassingly stupid thing to say, as it implies that SWR can only cope with the usual number of trains needing repairs at any one time, but this excuse didn’t start with nationalisation.

There are some statistics about reliability in the article and the government has some genuine questions to answer, but the cherry picking turns to outright lying when it comes to fares.

We start off with:

Despite the expectation that fares on a renationalised network would fall as there would no longer be shareholders to cream off profits, prices have surged.

Well, first of all the expectation that fares will fall is pretty obviously made up, but we are in the middle of a one-year price freeze.

To counter that, CLARK goes all anecdotal again:

the standard price of a return from London to Edinburgh is an astonishing £409 – more expensive than the cheapest return flight from London to New York (on the airline Norse Atlantic).

I made the journey to Edinburgh back in November 2008, when the line was run by National Express. The cost of my open return Saver ticket was £104, which if adjusted for inflation would now be £175. This means that the renationalised LNER has effectively doubled the cost.

With LNER renationalised (by the Tories) 10 years into this timescale, an increase over 18 years really can’t be laid at the door of nationalisation.

I think we can safely say that this does not provide “proof” that “bringing back the clanking, wheezing ghost of British Rail” will not make the trains run on time, even if anyone thought it might.